Ethnographic Sorcery

Ethnographic Sorcery

Ethnographic Sorcery

HARRY G. WEST

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London

HARRY G. WEST
is lecturer in anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He is author of
Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique
and co-editor of
Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order
and
Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2007 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2007
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
West, Harry G.
Ethnographic sorcery / Harry G. West,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
-13: 978-0-226-89397-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN
-13: 978-0-226-89398-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10:
0-226-89397-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10:
0-226-89398-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Makonde (African people)—Rites and ceremo-
nies. 2. Makonde (African people)—Religion.
3. Makonde (African people)—Politics and govern-
ment. 4. Witchcraft—Mozambique—Mueda Dis-
trict. 5. Magic—Mozambique—Mueda District.
6. Culture—Mozambique—Muede District—Semiotic
models. 7. Mueda District (Mozambique)—Social
conditions. 8. Mueda District (Mozambique)—
Politics and government. I. Title.
DT
3328.
M
35
W
46 2007
305.8 96'3 9 7—dc2 2
2006030054

♾ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI
Z39.48-1992.

For Catherine

P
REFACE

Having traveled downstream by canoe, a magician comes ashore to discover the charred remains of a fire god’s temple in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins” (1970). Though he knows nothing of his own past, he is animated by the desire to achieve “the most arduous task a man [can] undertake, . . . to mould the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of,” in short, “to dream a man . . . and insert him into reality.” He dreams a beating heart, “perceiv[ing] it, liv[ing] it, from many distances and many angles.” Over the course of the following year, bit by bit, he gives form to a complete man, into which the fire god breathes life. Following the god’s mandate, the magician—all the while haunted by the sense that what is happening has happened before—instructs his progeny in the rites of the fire cult, vacates his memory of all traces of his years of apprenticeship, and sends him off to inhabit an abandoned temple downstream. With the passage of time, the magician hears word from two boatmen traveling upstream of a man who walks on fire without being burned. He remembers being told by the fire god that all but he and fire itself would see his phantom dream-child as flesh and blood. “Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man’s dream, what a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo!” he laments. Soon thereafter, the sky grows
rose-colored, and flames converge on the magician and his temple. For an instant, he considers taking refuge in the river, before perceiving that death is coming “to crown his old age and absolve him of his labours.” The flames engulf him, caress him; “with relief, with humiliation, with terror, he under[stands] that he too [is] a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”

The story I tell in a previously published work, entitled
Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique
(2005a), is similar to Borges’s. On the Mueda plateau, it is said that sorcerers invisibly feed on the well-being of their rivals, neighbors, and/or kin. By rendering themselves invisible, they transcend the world inhabited by ordinary people, producing and inhabiting an invisible realm from which they gain powerful perspective on the visible—a platform from which to elaborate and bring to fruition ghastly visions of carnage that feed their insatiable appetites. These acts, however, do not go unchallenged. Responsible figures of authority, including healers, lineage councilors, settlement heads, and even contemporary village presidents, are also said to be capable of entering into the invisible realm of sorcery. Acting as “sorcerers of construction,” they transcend not only the world inhabited by ordinary Muedans but also that of “sorcerers of ruin,” fixing the latter in
their
gaze, monitoring and controlling sorcerers’ activities, unmaking sorcerers’ acts, and remaking the world in accordance with their own visions of a world reordered.
¹
What appears to one a constructive act may appear to another ruinous, and so the game of one-upmanship, comprising transcendent maneuvers that Muedans gloss with the verb
kupilikula
(to invert, to reverse, to overturn, to negate, to annul, to undo), continues in perpetuity.

As I describe in this previous work,
kupilikula
is a game into which everyone is drawn. When Catholic missionaries to the plateau region condemned Muedan sorcery beliefs and practices and offered their own vision of the forces defining earthly and heavenly domains, Muedans heard their words as condemnations of ruinous sorcery but, simultaneously, as the enactment of a novel form of sorcery of construction. Similarly, when the
revolutionary socialist leaders of the Mozambican Liberation Front (A Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or FRELIMO) dismissed Muedan talk of sorcery as a form of “false consciousness” and articulated their scientific socialist agenda for a transformed, postcolonial society, Muedans heard in their words claims to a transcendent vision such as the ones long professed by healers, lineage councilors, and settlement heads. Ironically, in reading missionaries and nationalists
as
(counter)sorcerers, Muedans fixed these figures in
their
own sights, unmaking their claims, and remaking the worlds that together they inhabited.

Notwithstanding the similarity between Borges’s story and my ethnography, in this volume I identify, not with the author of “The Circular Ruins,” but instead with the magician protagonist, for in making sorcery an object of ethnographic study in that earlier work—in exploring what Michael Jackson might refer to as the “existential uses and consequences” (1996: 6) of Muedan sorcery discourse—I myself (re)made Muedans and their world in accordance with a vision of my own elaboration. In this work, I explore the epistemological paradox arising from the ethnographic study of sorcery. My ethnography—my transcendent maneuver—scarcely ended the game of transcendence, it would seem. I too became the object of scrutiny by those who would unmake, and remake, me—by those who would challenge my vision and reinvent the world in accordance with their own. This volume tells the story of a dawning perception that all that happens has happened before—that the ethnographer, like those he dreams, is himself susceptible to being dreamt.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume draws upon research conducted with the financial support of the Land Tenure Center (University of Wisconsin– Madison), the Fulbright-Hays Program, the United States Institute of Peace, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom), and the British Academy. This volume was written together with (in fact, in early drafts was a component part of) my first book,
Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique
(2005a). I therefore owe thanks here to all those I acknowledged in
Kupilikula.
A special thanks, however, goes to the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council/National Endowment for the Humanities and to the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, each of which provided fellowships to release me from teaching responsibilities to focus on writing. Participants in the Program in Agrarian Studies seminar provided a particularly stimulating environment in which to develop my thoughts. Principal among them was Eric Worby, with whom I exchanged ideas on a weekly basis during the most crucial periods of production of the pieces that became this volume. Portions of the book were presented in the Franz Boas Seminar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, the weekly seminar in the Program in Agrarian
Studies at Yale University, and the weekly seminar in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, each of which afforded stimulating commentary. Partial or whole drafts were read by Barney Bate, Alex Bortolot, Matthew Engelke, Carol Greenhouse, Charles Hirschkind, Paolo Israel, Shelley Khadem, Tracy Luedke, Thomas Dodie McDow, Parvathi Raman, and Karolina Szmagalska, each of whom provided constructive criticism. Valuable feedback was also given by Don Brenneis and Michael Lambek in their capacities as readers for the University of Chicago Press. My thanks also go to everyone at the University of Chicago Press, including David Brent, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, and Pamela Bruton. Once again, I owe my deepest debt of gratitude to the Muedans among whom I worked, and especially to those who collaborated with me in my research, namely, Marcos Agostinho Mandumbwe, Eusébio Tissa Kairo, and Felista Elias Mkaima.

M
ISUNDERSTANDING

He lives by imagination and wit and what he sells are metaphors.

«
LANDEG WHITE,
Magomero
(1987: 250), in reference to Jagaja, a self-proclaimed “native doctor” selling remedies in the marketplace »

“Andiliki,” he said, “I think you misunderstand.” Years later, the words still ring in my ears. That he addressed me by my Shimakonde name
¹
reminded everyone in the room just how close to them all I had become and, perhaps, just how much I
did
understand of the history and culture of the residents of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, among whom I had been studying for nearly a year. Still, I had gotten it all wrong, he told me.

I had just finished giving a talk to an audience of some two dozen people assembled in the provincial office of the Cultural Heritage Archives (Arquivos do Patrimônio Cultural, or ARPAC) in Pemba. It was my third presentation in a series of three, given in late 1994 at the request of the archive’s provincial director. As I had benefited greatly in my field research from the assistance of an ARPAC staff researcher, namely Eusébio Tissa Kairo, I had been asked to give something back to the institution. Although each and every one of ARPAC’s half dozen staff researchers had far more ethnographic fieldwork experience
than I, none had much formal training in anthropological theory or methodology. I was asked to read through several of their research reports and to address a few topics that I thought might be of interest to them in their continuing professional work.

The chosen topic for my third talk, a brief introduction to the subfield of symbolic anthropology by way of Victor Turner’s essay “Symbols in Ndembu Ritual” (1967), was doubly motivated. While ARPAC researchers filled their reports with detailed ethnographic data, they hesitated, I noticed, to analyze or interpret what their informants told them. I wished to inspire them to move beyond the cataloguing of data and the verbatim quotation of informants that characterized their publications. Turner, I informed them, illustrated this through his analysis of the
nkang'a
(girls’ puberty) ritual. Clearly, according to Turner, the sap of the
mudyi
(milk) tree at the ritual’s center symbolized the milk of the initiate’s ripening breasts; beyond this, Turner’s informants told him that the tree symbolized unity—between the initiate and her mother, between the members of the initiate’s matrilineage, and between all Ndembu more generally. Because, however, the ritual as Turner saw it actually produced and enacted tensions in each of these relationships—separating daughter from mother and pitting matrilineage against matrilineage and Ndembu women against Ndembu men—he concluded that, despite Ndembu exegesis (or lack thereof), the tree also symbolized the social tensions that the ritual mediated. I wondered what my audience would make of Turner’s audacious conclusion that anthropologists such as he—
and
such as they—might see and interpret a ritual event unencumbered by the “interests” and “sentiments” that “impair [the native’s] understanding of the total situation” (27).